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Kurdish journalist and writer Ozgur Amed has recently been sentenced to 3 years in prison for his political activism on behalf of the Kurdish people. The 7th Criminal High Court of Diyarbakir sentenced Ozgur on the trumped up charge of “committing an illegal organization crime while not being an illegal organization member”.

This piece of double speak refers to Ozgur’s participation in a demonstration in Diyarbakir three days after a Turkish war plane massacred 34 Kurdish civilians in the Roboski village on the 28th December 2011.

In recent weeks the Ebola epidemic in West Africa has slowed from a peak of more than 1,000 new cases per week to 99 confirmed cases during the week of February 22, according to the World Health Organization. For two countries that have taken diametrically opposed approaches to combating the disease, the stark difference in the results achieved over the last five months has become evident.

The United States, which sent about 2,800 military troops to the region in October, has announced an end to its relief mission. Most soldiers have already returned. Pentagon Press Secretary Rear Admiral John Kirby declared …

Over the past 50 years the US and European powers have engaged in countless imperial wars throughout the world. The drive for world supremacy has been clothed in the rhetoric of “world leadership”, the consequences have been devastating for the peoples targeted. The biggest, longest and most numerous wars have been carried out by the United States. Presidents from both parties direct and preside over this quest for world power. The ideology which informs imperialism varies from “anti-communism” in the past to “anti-terrorism” today.

“In an age when man has forgotten his origins and is blind even to his most essential needs for survival, water along with other resources has become the victim of his indifference.” Rachel Carson

It’s not as if we in the Inland Northwest have a shortage of adherents of the mother of modern environmentalism, Dr. Rachel Carson, whose seminal work, Silent Spring (1962) is both the bible and standard manual for today’s activists looking to stave off environmental and societal collapse.

I’ve had the pleasure of running the Spokane River, Little Spokane, Coeur ‘d’Alene, and parts of the Columbia with some passionate …

Note: It’s been a long while since I posted. Obvious reasons include massive amounts of work, and, well, really, what do these articles, amassed, do to forward a revolution against the United States of Israel, the Empire of Entropy, the Star Chambers and warped men and women in Brooks Brothers outfits? Really. One fine fellow recently said that all the so-called progressive and lefty liberals writing these days for things like Counterpunch or In These Times,The Nation, what have you, are part of the leisure class, or at least those pleasantly surviving with health insurance, no rental or mortgage payment …

On Wednesday, February 25, the Wisconsin Senate passed a so-called “right-to-work” bill, which will almost certainly be approved by the Republican-dominated state Assembly next week and signed by Governor Scott Walker. As debate began, I was arrested and dragged away by at least six police officers along with my brother. We were standing in a hallway outside the Senate chamber; the police deemed that we as Wisconsin citizens had no right to be there, in our own house of government. I was processed and held at the county jail, and charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. Resisting arrest is …

Coursing through the trackless wastes between Toronto and Winnipeg, our intrepid reporter Rap (short for “rapporteur,” just to add a touch of class), taking a leaf from Stephen Colbert (Col-bear) and his Report (pronouced Re-poor), checked in recently. In fact the paper trail of his expense account items continued, meandering across Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, notably hovering in Camden, N.J. with an item for $139.50 dateline Moe’s Jazz Society. But no matter. He’s now in Atlantic City and has updated us with a full report.

Yoan Moncada, the 19-year-old Cuban baseball phenom, agreed on Monday to sign with the Boston Red Sox. He is the latest talent from the baseball-crazy nation to join the Major Leagues. Moncada will receive a $31.5 million signing bonus, which should make him financially secure for life. But because of the U.S. government’s continued economic war on the Cuban people, in the form of the 54-year-old embargo, Moncada — unlike MLB prospects from any other country on the planet — will be forced to surrender residency in his native land to realize his professional dreams.

The Federal Communications Commission chairman Tom Wheeler was bullish after the 3-2 vote of his commission reclassifying broadband as common carriers. Companies such as Verizon had made their mark in previous litigation, arguing that the FCC had bungled over imposing common carrier regulations on broadband providers. The issue was one of classification: as such providers were never common carriers to begin with – at least within the purview of the FCC – they could not be treated as such.

“We have addressed that issue, that is the underlying issue, that is the sine qua non of all …

Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad to hear that Congress members will skip Netanyahu’s speech no matter what reason they offer. Here are some of them:

It’s too close to Netanyahu’s election. (That doesn’t persuade me. If we had fair, open, publicly funded, un-gerrymandered, verifiably counted elections, then “politics” wouldn’t be a dirty word and we would want politicians to show themselves doing things to try to please us before, during, and after elections. I want them acting that way now, even with our broken system. I don’t want the U.S. interfering in Israeli elections, but allowing a speech …

As a secular Jew, I don’t do much praying. But this week, as the powerful pro-Israeli government lobby AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee) holds its annual policy meeting in Washington DC, I’m praying that this year marks the beginning of the end of the lobby’s grip on US foreign policy.

From March 1-3, over 10,000 AIPAC supporters will descend on the nation’s capital. The meeting comes at a time when the relationship between President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is at an all-time low. Speaker John Boehner’s invitation to Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress …

Imagine this scenario: The following is a Public Service Announcement by the New York Department of Environmental Conservation, Division of Water, July 4, 2015: Because of low water levels in state reservoirs, the Division of Water proclaims a statewide water-rationing program. Starting next month, on August 1st, 2015, water service will turn off at 1:00 P.M. on a daily basis for an indeterminate period of time. Service will return the following morning.

Now, imagine a city the size of the State of New York with its 20 million people subjected to the same water-rationing plan. As it happens, São Paulo, capital …

India can hardly be part of BRICS, if BRICS is to remain one of the main symbols of the fight against Western imperialism and savage global market fundamentalism.

“India is dreaming about becoming next United States. And people, brainwashed by the Western and Indian corporate media, are hoping that Prime Minister Modi will take them there,” explained Mr. Binu Matthew, the editor of an influential progressive Indian web-based magazine Countercurrents, which operates from the southern state of Kerala. “Poor people and the lower middle-class are fully obliterated; they have disappeared from television screens, from newspapers and from Bollywood films… Unless …

“The world can only be changed by people who don’t like it,” wrote Bertolt Brecht in explaining why radicals have a negative attitude about the society we live in. We don’t like the way things are. Sometimes our dislike can even become loathing.

It was in just such a fit of loathing that the idea for my new novel, Lila, the Revolutionary, came to me. I was appalled by how capitalism has become so pervasive and aggressive, a globalized madness. In despair, I saw all these predatory men and women in dark suits commanding us, marching us resolutely towards war and …

…when you select heroes about which black children ought to be taught, let them be black heroes who have died fighting for the benefit of black people. We never were taught about Christophe or Dessalines. It was the slave revolt in Haiti when slaves, black slaves, had the soldiers of Napoleon tied down and forced him to sell one half of the American continent to the Americans. They don’t teach us that. This is the kind of history we want to learn.

Ever so tepidly, Ron Paul’s widely-reported recent editorial How Many More Wars? recasts the fiscal preoccupations that often dominate the war question. Uninitiated readers could easily conclude that fiscal irresponsibility is the immoral center of U.S. military misadventures. Yet surely Mr. Paul, the killing and maiming of tens of thousands out-outrages budgetary malfeasance? Nonetheless we’ll acquiesce to the former Senator’s favored moral compass, parsimony, as a way in to the latest looming debacle out of Washington ’cause, sadly enough, money commandeers the debate in ways both subtle and …

In Venezuela, politics is always a cause for misunderstanding and long heated conversations among friends and people in the streets. But Venezuelans are far from being a people who would turn against each other. We are known for our easygoing nature and good humor, for loving our visitors, and for being talkative and even sometimes nosy.

During the last year, however, we have seen a fierce media campaign to portray Venezuela as not only a chaotic nation and impossible to govern, but a place where political factions are ready to launch a violent civil war.

There are people, usually of a Leftist persuasion, who otherwise come under the umbrella term of progressivism. Many might well point to the ineffectiveness or futility of progressivism as a movement given the regressivist trends in society: fascism as adduced by corporatization of the power structure, the mere existence of a power structure and its hierarchy, greater inequality, government secrecy and intrusion into the privacy of citizens, espionage, militaristic policing, racism, militaristic hegemony, wars, …